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Fear of missing out. The trial of our children’s generation. All of their friends have a slab of glass in their pocket, and spend every free moment endlessly scrolling through TikTok videos.

At the start of our discussion this morning, I was the oppressive dad, unjustly preventing his children from participating in what everyone else is doing. By the end of it, they were willing to concede that, just maybe, I am the protective dad, worried about the addictive hold of Tik Tok, its intrusive nature and power to influence immature minds.

This was achieved not by lecturing them, but by asking them to watch a video created by one of their peers. By now, only their peers can truly be taken seriously. Their parents, they believe, are too old to understand the modern world, having grown up in a period before the web was truly a thing.

It doesn’t really matter to them that I work in the web professionally, predominantly in a mental health setting. While I could easily explain that all of these apps are engineered with the explicit intention of making them extremely addictive, me saying so is unhelpful. This needs to be said not by an old fogey like me — in this age of shortened attentions, middle age seems an epoch away — but by a young person just a little older than them.

His exaggerated histrionics are this time a great help. His claims of the app being a data collection tool for the Chinese government may be over-egged, but it is nevertheless helpful to reinforce old notions of privacy. As a web dev, I chuckle when he expresses alarm at the type of data collected by the app, given that virtually every web service does the same, cookie consent permitting.

But regardless of the limitations of the seventeen year-old’s analysis, his overriding thesis rings true. Users are being socially engineered by tech companies, to keep them hooked. Personally I believe this is more about the perpetuation of capitalism and profits, than a long-term strategy to dumb-down a generation, but the effect is the same in either case. Your innate psychology is used against you.

If wise sages have spent millennia helping seekers to tame their egos and resist their lowest impulses, these apps do the opposite, prioritising every gateway to the soul. Far from calling you to lower your gaze, your eyes are being trained to gaze perpetually, and often at content that would have embarrassed previous generations. Far from calling you to be content with being unknown, you are being trained to pursue likes and followings, at any cost.

Fear of missing out is a powerful feeling. Those of us likewise raised by strict families know the feeling well. In our time, we were deprived of the Game Boy, Nintendo PlayStation, or unrestricted television watching. In our youth, we too were expected to prioritise our studies, and find other ways to occupy ourselves. But those were different times.

I admit that our approach is a hard one, but I truly believe it is the better strategy. They can play computer games in their downtime, within reason. They can watch their favourite television programmes at the weekend. They can access the web when they need to. But to have it constantly in their grasp, in every waking moment: no, I’m not going to give them an addictive drug like that.

Eventually we all have to learn that, actually, it’s okay to miss out. Maybe, when we embrace this feeling, we will begin to notice what we have really been missing out on all along.